Cloud Connected

Thoughts and Ideas from the Gitana Development Team

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Create Once, Publish Everywhere!

One of the things that our customers love about Cloud CMS is that it lets them create content once and easily publish it to all of their mobile and web applications. It reduces the amount of work required to create fresh and interesting content and saves them time and money in the process.

Our goal is straightforward. We want to provide all of the things that small business owners need on the backend to give their users a seamless experience in creating, editing and publishing content. With Cloud CMS, you don’t have to build this stuff yourself or integrate it. It’s all there, ready to go from the moment you sign up.

We provide a complete collaborative suite of software including applications, forms, desktop integration and workflow. Business users can create content right away. You can define custom content types, lists and pages. And you can invite team members to work alongside you as content is moved from curation to publication.

Content API

Cloud CMS provides the first pure content API for cloud-connected applications. Our API (REST) is delivered over HTTPS and can easily be integrated into your iOS, Android and HTML5 applications.

We provide quick start projects to help you get on your way. We also provide clients for various platforms including Node.js, Android, Java and JavaScript.

Hosted Applications

Cloud CMS provides an web server tier that lets your business deploy hosted applications for dev, test, QA and production. You can run your application infrastructure this way, on the Cloud CMS hosted tier, or you can host on Heroku, Engine Yard and others. This hosting can consist the entire application or custom APIs specific to your apps.

Instant Preview

One of the truly unique and productive features of Cloud CMS is Instant Preview. With Cloud CMS, you can instantly preview any content changes that you’re working on in real-time, so as to see what those changes might look like if there were live. This lets your business users see changes as they might appear on iOS, Android, the web or a responsive mobile application – the same data formatted in many different ways for different devices.

We’re really excited about how Cloud CMS has grown. Over the past 3+ years, we’ve had a chance to dig in and build what our customers have asked for. We think you’ll find it to be a really exciting platform that is incredibly feature rich, low cost, and well-designed.

To learn more about Cloud CMS or request a trial, please visit our web site at http://www.cloudcms.com.

Easy Forms with Cloud CMS

One of the many uses of Cloud CMS is as a storage and reporting mechanism for forms. If you’re looking to put a form up onto your web or mobile site, Cloud CMS serves as an excellent option for capturing and storing this information.

Fundamentally, Cloud CMS provides the Alpaca forms engine. Alpaca is an open-source JavaScript library for jQuery. It makes it easy to design and insert forms into your sites.

Cloud CMS built Alpaca and been working with the broader community to improve it and make it more feature complete. Alpaca provides a large library of pre-built controls.

You can easily do things like render a simple form:

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Or a more complex form with multiple fields:

Alpaca provides a library of lots of field types - ranging from basic input things (text, checkbox, select, etc) all the way to full-screen text editors and Google Maps interactive fields.

You can also fully customize the layout of your forms as well as take advantage of automatic features like validation:

Once you’ve built your form, you can connect it to Cloud CMS. This lets you load and save data to/from the Cloud CMS servers. When your users submit their forms, the form data is stored in a data list.

A data list lets you see all of the records including all of the properties of the form, when it was submitted, who submitted it and more.

Data list items are regular nodes in the Cloud CMS world and so you can work with them just like any other content. For example, you might set up rules that trigger notifications, send response emails or transform content for repurposing within your business.

Alpaca 1.0.3 Released!

We’re pleased to announce the release of Alpaca Web Forms 1.0.3 for jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

Alpaca is an open-source project that provides an easy way to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a jQuery plugin and provides a nice abstraction so that you can change form layouts, validation logic and presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca provides the web forms capabilities for Cloud CMS - The Cloud Content Management Platform for the Enterprise.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and new features. These fixes and features are described more fully below.

Easier to Build

Alpaca 1.0.3 includes a new build structure that is lightweight and easier to work with. Everything is now fully-driven by Ant and all of the source files are completely intact without any build or compilation step. This mean that you can quickly test changes to core files by simply launching a web server and mounting the source.

AMD Modules

Alpaca 1.0.3 also includes optional support for AMD (Asynchronous Module Definitions). This makes Alpaca compatible with RequireJS, Curl and other AMD loaders.

Alpaca now features a wrapper around its code that detects the presence of an AMD environment. This is similar to how jQuery and others now do it. If AMD is available, Alpaca will define the “alpaca” module.

Cloud CMS hosts its AMD modules, including Alpaca, online here: https://github.com/cloudcms-components

What’s New

Alpaca 1.0.3 has a number of new features and fixes.

  1. Previewing of Form ahead of commit
  2. Arrays now support custom labels on Item move, add and remove
  3. Multi-select of array data
  4. Array name field now properly calculated
  5. Improvements to Mobile UI layout and rendering
  6. Improved JSON formatting via JSON editor
  7. WYSIWYG validation now properly fires
  8. Support for read-only arrays
  9. Easier programmatic access to buttons on rendered form
  10. Addition of DateTime field
  11. Improved support for EventListeners
  12. More Sample Code
  13. Sample Login Form
  14. Lazy Loading of Field Values
  15. Examples of Form Previews
  16. How to use DateTime Control


We encourage our community to check out Alpaca 1.0.3! You can download Alpaca by visiting our web site at http://www.alpacajs.org.

For code-level information on these bug fixes and new features, please visit our GitHub project at https://github.com/gitana/alpaca.